Twenty Centavos: A Mystery Set in San Miguel de Allende

by John Scherber

  “I can.”

  “Of course. And we do love Marisol. I never thought Tobey would marry a Méxican girl. When he dated...well there she is over there.” He nodded subtly to indicate a tall slender blond woman across the room who appeared to be in her early forties. She was still attractive. “Gail Stone; she was a couple years behind him at Edina High. I thought for sure they’d get married, but then one day, quite suddenly, they weren’t together anymore. She married a doctor later, but now she’s divorced. She got the house, it’s just down the block here. Gail was a client of mine until I retired. I think she’s done OK for herself,” he finished, ending on a positive note. I wondered whether it was the divorce or his investment management that had set her up so well.

  Maya was coming toward us with a plate of food and a glass of white wine. She was restrained but elegant in a straight black skirt and beige silk blouse. I rarely saw her so formal. Brent leaned over to say something to the passing server and I whispered to Maya in Spanish, “Did you pump the mother?”

  “Pump her?” she looked alarmed. Some things don’t translate well and I didn’t get an answer. She stayed to talk to Brent Cross while I filled a plate and made my way over to Gail Stone. There were mushroom caps stuffed with something like crab, vegetable sticks, little sausages in a spicy sauce, triangular pastries filled with cream cheese.

  I introduced myself. “Gail, Brent Cross was telling me you were an old friend of Tobey’s. I wonder if I might ask you a couple of questions? Marisol has asked me to look into the circumstances of his death. She wants a different perspective from what she might get from the Méxican police. I’ve been trying to learn more about his background and I think it’s fascinating that he could make the transition from finance to antiques.”

  “Well, it didn’t seem odd, for him. Tobey and I went out for several years. Almost three, I think. I hardly knew him in school, but when he came back from New York, after the Parsons School, you know, someone got us together again and we just hit it off. I remembered him as kind of a nerd in high school, a budding connoisseur of just about everything. But when he got back, and we were all a little older, he was very polished and knowledgeable. He seemed to wear it better at that age. I guess no one likes a 16 year old expert.”

  Her coloring was dark for a blonde in midwinter. Scottsdale, I thought, or maybe Florida. She had large pores that marred the total effect this close, but her brown eyes were beautiful and her hands elegant. Of course, you’d never paint individual pores, they’d look like pockmarks. Surprising for January, her dress was short-sleeved and her arms were covered with the fine hair blondes often have. She wore no rings.

  “Was he in finance then?”

  “Yes. It seemed very exciting at first. Brent got him into a firm in St. Paul. It didn’t take long before he was making some impressive money. That was when I began to think I might marry him. But the hours were long and he started to change in ways I didn’t like.”

  “How was that?” I didn’t look directly at her as I said this, but it made me think we might be getting into something interesting.

  She turned away from me to the left and didn’t meet my gaze. “Oh, I don’t know. I hate to talk about him now, especially, but he began to get kind of cold. Like the business was taking something out of him, some of his humanity, I guess. I know he wished he had gone into the antiques business instead. Anyway, then it started to blow up.”

  “Blow up?” I kept my voice neutral but her comment sounded like a door opening.

  “Well, I really shouldn’t say anything more. Brent is starting to look at me. It just ended, OK? And I married someone else after a while, and that didn’t work out either.” She still looked around the room, not at me, as if we weren’t having this conversation. “I don’t remember you from Edina. Were you an old friend? You seem too young.”

  “I only knew him in México. My girlfriend Maya is a close friend of Marisol.”

  “Are you in the antiques business?”

  “No, but I’m looking into it.” She nodded. Probably there was an opening in the field now. I wondered if she was seeing herself in Marisol’s shoes. Gail Stone would be the widow had she married Tobey instead of the doctor.

  We talked a little more about the weather and the Crosses’ house and then she excused herself and went into the dining room. I had the feeling I had raised some painful memories. Or maybe the funeral itself had.

  How had Marisol connected on a personal level with this stylish connoisseur with his elegant clothes and tasteful engravings? I wanted to think it was more than just his prospects. Apparently she had humanity enough for both of them. Looking around the room I didn’t see her.

  I was standing next to a shoulder-height bookcase with glass doors. Four photographs of Tobey stood on the top. In the one that caught my eye he looked about eight years old, wearing a tweed jacket with a bow tie. His right arm was around the neck of a perky young Airedale. He wore a toothy grin and his teeth seemed too big for his mouth. Now he was in the ground, frozen solid. It seemed like an odd thing to think about, but given the weather I couldn’t avoid it.

  The minister came up and introduced himself. “Forsyth,” he said, “John Forsyth, like the actor. Are you from out of town?”

  “Central México. I’m Paul Zacher. I knew Tobey in San Miguel de Allende.” I wondered if I should have said Abbott.

  “Of course I hadn’t seen him in many years, since he was a kid, really. But Brent is a long time elder in our church. He used to manage our portfolio before he retired.” I wondered why a church would need tax exempt bonds. Of course, investments were not my long suit; I mainly took positions in things like food and electricity, gasoline, tequila. A box of Cuban cigars was a major offshore holding, one that usually didn’t last long.

  Later I found Maya and took her hand and we said our goodbyes. How good it was to have her and just be together. I wondered if we were unduly complicating our lives by being in the middle of this. I didn’t know who killed Tobey, but I suspected the name was somewhere on the customer list. Or maybe it was Ramon Xoc? Did he feel cheated? As a creative person it didn’t seem like he could be a killer, although that may have been nothing more than my personal prejudice. We’d probably never get to ask him.

  Four blocks down on West 50th Street was a restaurant with a small bar we had noticed driving past on the way to the church. The wind was down now and I put on my baseball cap as we braved the icy sidewalks. I wished it had room for my ears. Maya gripped my arm the whole way. Marisol stayed behind to finish out the day with the Cross family. I knew the conversations they’d have after all the guests left. The parents would remember him mostly as a child.

  The restaurant was called Tejas, which we both knew how to pronounce, and it had a southwestern ambiance that might have been Albuquerque or Laredo. We each had a coffee with a stiff shot of Irish whiskey in it and we didn’t speak for a while. Sitting near the front windows, which was a chilly mistake, we watched scattered flakes of snow drift past.

  Maya blew her nose and said, “I want to go home now. It would be bad just to be here this time of year, but to be here for a funeral, it’s too much. I want to work on my research, I want to think about the Indians in the Revolution, I want to sit in the Santa Monica and have a margarita. I want to be in my garden and watch the bamboo grow. I want you to be painting me and I want to be in bed with you after.”

  “You don’t ask for much.” I took a sip of the spiked coffee.

  “No. I don’t. I am ready to be screaming quite soon now.”

  “Maybe later in the cab. This looks like a nice family place.”

  She screwed up her mouth and looked at me across the table. The sun was so low it came sideways into the restaurant and lit her hands which were together, but working strangely as if trying to escape from each other. The funny Cossack coat was over her shoulders and dragging on the floor. Her thick glossy black hair looked out of place against the snow outside.

  “The mother
didn’t have much to say,” she went on. “She is very sad and she does not understand what happened. She thinks México is a dangerous place now.”

  “But she doesn’t blame Marisol?”

  “No. She doesn’t think Marisol could have stopped it.”

  “I didn’t learn much, either,” I said. “But I think something bad happened to Tobey back here, years ago. No one wants to talk about it. I guess I can understand, especially now that he’s dead. But I feel like his dying was the end of something that began here, not in México.”

  “There is one thing we need to do, though. When we get back to the hotel there will be a computer we can use to e-mail Cody. He can try again with the police, using the Abbott name,” she said. “I never knew he was Abbott. I never heard Marisol use that name.”

  The next morning we left the frozen zone without regret while Marisol stayed behind to spend a few days with the Crosses. I wondered how often she would see them again after she returned to México. Maya and I were both depressed. It was another gray day when we got on the plane, but as it climbed above the clouds we left something behind. The sun emerged and stayed with us, first on one side, then the other, all the way to the Houston stopover and then to Leon. Maya began to flirt with the man next to her on the aisle and I knew she was feeling better. I just wanted to have a brush in my hand again. We had been gone only two days, but it seemed like the right antidote to funerals and wind-chill. Maybe some of my paintings would still be intact when we got back to San Miguel.

  We pulled up before our house on Quebrada and while Maya settled the cab bill I pulled out our luggage and set it on the 18 inch wide sidewalk and threw the coats on top. Thankfully, our door was still locked. Inside I went up the two worn steps and reached for the light switch a little further on. My hand missed it when I tripped over something bulky laying in my path. It was too dark to see the stone floor, even when it hit me in the face.

  I didn’t quite lose consciousness. Then the light was on and Maya was screaming in the way that normally would have awakened the dead, but it didn’t work this time; the man whose body my legs were laying across was still dead. I got to my hands and knees and put two fingers to the man’s neck, but there was no question of a pulse. His skin was cold but yielding. The air was thick with an unfamiliar but distinctive smell that I hadn’t noticed at first. There was an exit wound on the back of his head with dried blood mixed with other material I didn’t want to try to identify.

  “This man has been dead for a while,” I said. “The rigor is gone.” I had read somewhere that it lasted less than a day.

  He was lying face down with one arm outstretched and the other beneath him. One knee was bent and he did not seem like a large man. He had thick black hair caked with blood, and medium dark skin tones. Even before I turned his head to see his face I thought I knew who he was, although I had only seen his photograph on one recent occasion, far away in the Yucatan.

  Chapter 11

  Maya was kneeling beside the dead man, her hands working uselessly as if she thought she should be doing something for him. “It is Ramon Xoc,” she said. I turned his face. His nose was flattened to one side from pressing on the stone but the resemblance to the picture in Izamal was unmistakable. One eye was gone from the entry of the bullet, the eyelids puckered and blackened. The other was open. Blood had streamed around his face in a narrow band and dried in his ear. His mouth was slightly open and on the floor was a bright coin. I picked it up. “Twenty centavos,” I said, not surprised. I put it back on the floor, knowing I shouldn’t have touched it. My forehead was still throbbing.

  “How did you know it was Ramon?” I asked her.

  “Who else could it be?” I put my arms around her and we sat on the floor for a while, away from the body. She wouldn’t look at it but I couldn’t stop myself, as if it were about to speak to me.

  “I guess we should call Licenciado Delgado,” I said after a while, “the one who’s been working with Marisol.”

  In México, murder investigations are typically handled by the Judicial Police, who are much like assistant district attorneys in the U.S. They are often found working the same crime scene with the aid of uniform police, but their rank is higher and their chain of command goes up through the court system. They are part of the Agencia del Ministerio Publico. Training for this position includes a law degree, as well as forensic and investigative studies. Most Méxicans don’t trust them any more than they trust the uniform police.

  Still dizzy, I got up and phoned the Policia Judicial and reached Delgado. While we waited for his arrival I brought in the luggage, then thought of something and ran upstairs to check the studio. My pictures were all undamaged.

  A white unmarked car arrived in 10 minutes with an ambulance immediately behind. It was Licenciado Delgado with two uniformed cops, plus the ambulance driver, a medical tech, and a forensic tech.

  Diego Delgado was a slightly bulky man of about 40 with pouches under his eyes. Delgado means thin, but the only thing truly thin about him was his mustache, which reminded me of a 1950s Méxican movie star. His neck bulged comfortably over his collar and his suit was brown with shiny spots at the knees and elbows as if his job required him to crawl around now and then. As we introduced ourselves he gave us a neutral look.

  The tech confirmed that the man was dead. “I’ll have to make a test to determine how long,” he said.

  Delgado pulled on a pair of latex gloves and looked at the bruise on my forehead. “You had a fight with him, Señor Zacher?”

  “No. I tripped over the body when I came in.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “No.” Maya looked at me but said nothing. We were still so shocked we hadn’t thought to decide how to play this.

  “Señorita Sanchez, do you know him?”

  “No. I never saw him before.”

  One of the other police began to photograph the scene while Delgado made a careful inspection of the room. “You did not move him?” he said over his shoulder.

  “Only his head a little, to see his face.”

  “Normally a man who is shot in the face does not fall forward like this when he dies. Did you clean up the blood?”

  “No. Everything is as it was, except that I picked up the coin to look at it. I’m sure my fingerprints are on it.”

  Delgado continued to search the walls and ceiling with a flashlight. He scanned the surfaces of my two Diego Rivera copies that hung flanking the entry to the garden and moved his hands over the wood of the street door, showing no reaction. When the photographer had finished the ambulance driver and one of the uniformed cops turned the body onto a stretcher. Delgado went through the pockets and placed the contents on the hall table beneath one of my fake Riveras. There was a hotel key with a plastic oval tag that read “12,” seven coins, and a small comb.

  “No identification,” said Delgado. “Why would he come to your house? You had business with him, yes?”

  “As I said, I have never seen him before.”

  “So you did. Was the entry door locked when you returned?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you find that odd?”

  “Not until I saw the body.”

  The forensic tech began to dust the door and the lock for prints.

  “I would like to have your fingerprints,” said Delgado, “both of you, so we know which to ignore.” One of the men got out a kit from a small satchel.

  “You each have a key?” I pulled mine out and Maya searched in her purse and produced hers.

  “Is there an extra key?”

  “Yes, in the kitchen.” I went to find it. It was in its usual place, the drawer below the phone. Back in the zaguan I said to Delgado, “I don’t understand how they got in; the key is where I left it.”

  He merely nodded. “You have been traveling today?”

  “Yes, we were in Minneapolis for the funeral of Tobey Cross.”

  “Deep in Gringolandia.”

  “Very. Too deep, in
fact.”

  “So you came in at Leon?”

  “Yes, Continental and Immigration will confirm that.”

  “What time did you leave this morning from Minneapolis?”

  “About nine o’clock.” Delgado made some notes in a spiral notebook.

  “Is anything missing from the house?”

  “We haven’t looked at the other rooms except for the studio. We called you as soon as we found him and we waited right here.”

  Delgado walked with us as we went through the rest of the house. I turned on lights in the garden and in each room as we went. Again I had the sense of violation.

  In the studio Delgado paused before the beginning of Barbara’s painting. “This is you?” he said to Maya with his eyebrows raised.

  “No,” she said. “It is another.”

  “So there is another woman who takes her clothes off for you?” He looked at Maya instead of me as he said this. She didn’t react.

  “It’s a living,” I said.

  “It must be difficult for you,” he said to Maya.

  “Sometimes.”

  “And that is not her husband downstairs?”

  “No, I know the husband of this woman. He is a collector. He will buy the picture.”

  “How much does he pay you?” I didn’t see the relevance of this, but with a dead body laying in my entry hall I didn’t want to antagonize him.

  “Four thousand dollars.”

  Delgado whistled. “Forty-four thousand, two hundred pesos!”

  “Yes.” Of course he knew the exact exchange rate.

  “You are a famous painter then?”

  “Not famous enough.”

  He moved toward the door. “Señor Zacher, I will wish to speak with you tomorrow in my office when we have had more time to think about this. Shall we say at 10 o’clock?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “You know the place? It is the police office on the Jardin, not the one on the Dolores Hidalgo road.”

  “Yes.”

  When we went downstairs the body was gone and the ambulance had driven away. The other police were waiting outside for Delgado.